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Wednesday, January 29, 2020

Tetris (MirrorSoft) - Atari ST [043] Short PlayThru



Tetris, one of the earliest puzzle games to become popular, was made in the USSR in 1984 by Alexey Pajitnov.  It is well known that the NES version of Tetris had a legal fight licensing the game that excluded Tengen from distributing a port they programmed, but the ST also had its own issue.



Two version of Tetris were released for the ST, one from MirrorSoft, which is the one presented here, and one from Spetrum Holobyte, the makers of the air combat simulator game Falcon.  So, how is this game?

My critiques: There is no variety in music, and the background of the playing area being yellow causes issues with seeing the yellow pieces and holes.  Whittaker's soundtrack is fine; it is just too bad more music was not designed, as the music cycling over and over gets annoying.

As for the play area, to me at least, the yellow tetris piece blends too much with the background of the board.  Also the background has a dazzle effect in shades of yellow that makes it hard for me to figure out which column a piece is falling in.  Both of these problems could be corrected by an ingenious hacker.  Otherwise, the rules are there, and the game plays just like Tetris should.

My advice:  Give Tetris a whirl on the ST, but turn the sound down and play your own tunes in the background.

Capture info -

This video was captured on December 24, 2019.

Game was played on an Atari 1040 STf, TOS 1.4, 1MB, equipped with a CosmosEX from Jookie.
A Best Electronics ST Monitor to VGA cable was used, connected to an OSSC 1.6 (processing the video in Line4x mode), with the output being captured by a Startech USB3HDCAP.

Video was edited with Shotcut.






 

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